When former New York Mayor
Michael Bloomberg spoke at the Harvard University commencement ceremony in May,
he inadvertently gave his many critics a good, old-fashioned belly laugh. In
his address, Bloomberg railed against liberals, especially Ivy League college
students, for stifling free speech and repressing conservative ideals. Said
Bloomberg, “Great universities must not become predictably partisan. And a
liberal arts education must not be an education in the art of liberalism.”
Bloomberg emphasized that a university’s obligation is not to teach students
what to think but how to think.

Most would agree with
Bloomberg’s learning philosophy: Keep an open mind and hear out opinions that
may conflict with your own. But Bloomberg would be unlikely to apply his
seemingly generous reasoning to immigration. In fact, in his 2008 State of the
City address, Bloomberg took a direct shot at politicians that have “embraced
xenophobia.” Bloomberg, then considered a potential Republican presidential
candidate, used his pro-immigration platform to identify himself as favoring of
“freedom, compassion, democracy, and opportunity.”

Since 2008, Bloomberg has become richer, more
influential, and one of the most unbending and outspoken amnesty advocates.
Bloomberg’s $33 billion net worth places him as the world’s sixteenth richest
man. After graduating in 1964 from Johns Hopkins University with a Bachelor of
Science degree and then earning a Master of Business Education diploma from the
Harvard Business School in 1966, Bloomberg launched his Wall Street career at
the powerful Salomon Brothers, which along with Goldman Sachs was one of the
bulge bracket investment banks that wielded vast global influence. Bloomberg
quickly became a general partner. Then, abruptly in 1981, Phibro, formerly
known as Philipp Brothers, bought Salomon. Bloomberg got a $10 million
severance check and was cut loose. Within a few weeks, Bloomberg formed
Innovative Market Systems, which later changed its name to Bloomberg L.P.

Wall Street was then and is now one of the
leading advocates for more immigration. Cheap labor for the Street’s
well-heeled corporate clients is a guiding business principle and one that
Bloomberg quickly embraced.
After more than 10 years of successfully building Bloomberg, L.P. into a major
corporate force, Bloomberg, encouraged by his Wall Street allies, left the
Democratic Party, became a Republican, and in 2001, ran for New York mayor.
His predecessor, Rudy Guiliani, was also a staunch amnesty advocate.

Although Bloomberg was elected just two months
after the 9/11 World Trade Tower attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans,
many of them New York residents, the mass murders didn’t open Bloomberg’s eyes
to the ongoing folly of U.S. immigration policy. Bloomberg was re-elected in
2005 and, after successfully lobbying to change the term limits law, elected a
third time in 2009.

During the twelve years he
served as mayor, Bloomberg’s pro-immigration, pro-importing more overseas
workers, and anti-enforcement positions hardened. Bloomberg made a series of
public statements that showed little of the tolerance he urged at Harvard. In
2006, Bloomberg told CNN that the idea of deporting millions of illegal
immigrants is a “fiction,” and that they do “a lot of jobs other people don’t
seem to want to do.” Again in 2006, citing deportation as an impossibility and
claiming Americans won’t do certain jobs, Bloomberg relied on worn-out deceptions
to make his argument. At various times during his tenure, especially
post-9/11 when Manhattan was on its heels, Bloomberg insisted that illegal
immigrants didn’t present a drain on New York’s economy, a statement that on
its face is false since at a minimum, aliens’ children enroll in public
schools.

During his years of
immigration advocacy, Bloomberg has consistently ignored the hard truths about
New York’s economic realities. In 2012, during a globalist-attended New York
STEM conference, Bloomberg said “our economy needs immigrants,” and put his
money where his mouth is. Bloomberg made a multibillion-dollar investment to
prepare the city for STEM jobs, created dozens of new technical education high
schools, supported a City University of New York expansion for STEM programs,
and lured Cornell University to build a $2 billion so-called genius school
graduate program to produce tech entrepreneurs.

But nowhere did Bloomberg’s
new schools or programs encourage American high school kids to study science,
technology, engineering, and math. In fact, based on those in attendance, who
included Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, IBM Vice President Stanley Litow, CUNY
Chancellor Matthew Goldstein, Daily News publisher Mortimer Zuckerman, and city
schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott, the conference’s purpose was to promote more
immigration. As Bloomberg put it, using language he’d used many times before,
“Our immigration policy is national suicide.”

Bloomberg has offered some
off-the-wall immigration solutions, including his most ludicrous idea that the
federal government should assign aliens to bankrupt cities like Detroit. If
they last seven years, Bloomberg suggested they should be rewarded with full
citizenship for them and their families. In 2012, when Bloomberg advanced his
preposterous idea, Detroit’s unemployment rate was 10.2 percent.

While promoting more
immigration, Bloomberg disregards New York’s acute shortage of well-paying
jobs. During most of Bloomberg’s last mayoral term, Citibank, one of the New
York’s major employers, laid off tens of thousands, as did other large
corporations like Time, Inc.

On another front, New
York’s income inequality, suddenly a significant political talking point, is
among the nation’s most severe. According to a City University of New York
analysis of the latest Census Bureau data, the median income of the richest 1
percent of New Yorkers increased to more than $716,000 per year in 2010 from
$452,000 in 1990. At the same time, New York school bus workers have been told
that a $30,000 annual income is excessive.

Then, there’s New York’s
poverty rate. Even though more New York adults are working than at any time
since the recession, 45.6 percent of city residents live near the poverty line.
Their already low incomes have been further exacerbated by a sharp rise in
rental fees, a 75 percent increase between 2000 and 2012. Interestingly, the
Center for Economic Opportunity report found that the most adversely effected
were Hispanic and Asian immigrants.

The number of New Yorkers
classified as poor in 2010, the most recent year for which data are available,
increased by nearly 100,000 from 2009 and raised the poverty rate by 1.3
percent to 21 percent — the highest level and the largest year-to-year increase
since 2005, when New York adopted a more detailed system of measuring
impoverishment. Using federal standards as the metric, 7.7 percent of New
Yorkers live in poverty, meaning below 50 percent of the poverty line; 5.5
percent were in extreme poverty. The federal poverty line is $15,730 for a
family of two; $23,850 for a four-person household. One thing is for sure: If
Bloomberg gets his wish and more immigrants move to New York, income inequality
and poverty will increase.

In his first official act
after leaving office, Bloomberg traveled to Washington, D.C. to promote amnesty
as a civilian, albeit an extremely rich one. Appealing to House Republicans,
Bloomberg, with his Chamber of Commerce friends, said that without more
immigration, America doesn’t have a future. Bloomberg blamed a small group of
dedicated Americans who “raise money” and send letters. This is particularly
laughable since Bloomberg, Mark Zuckerberg, and Shelton Adelson’s billions
dwarf the sums available to enforcement groups. Bloomberg’s Partnership for a
New American Economy, allegedly a bipartisan organization but really a front
group for more immigration, publishes bias studies and organizes intentionally
misleading polls with the hope that the results will favorably influence the
amnesty outcome.

Although
Bloomberg has developed a valid reputation for his generous philanthropy, many
wonder why he doesn’t raise his voice on behalf of the millions of unemployed
or otherwise struggling Americans. Maybe Bloomberg really meant it when he said
that the fairways at his strictly limited-membership Deepdale Golf Club would
fall into disrepair if illegal aliens didn’t maintain them.

Nevertheless,
the question of why Bloomberg puts so much effort into an open borders agenda
is hard to answer. He doesn’t need the money cheap labor creates for most
businesses. And as a died-in-the-wool capitalist, Bloomberg should oppose the
wealth redistribution from the rich like him to millions from the immigrant
underclass. Since many immigrants have few skills and speak limited English, their
dependency on social services begins shortly after they arrive.

Like his fellow elitists at
Johns Hopkins, the Harvard Business School, Wall Street private dining rooms,
and the Long Island country club with its well manicured lawns, Bloomberg has
spent his entire life isolated from the realities of too much uncontrolled
immigration. Pontificating from the mayor’s dais or on a Sunday morning news
show makes for good sound bites. Bloomberg’s perception, however, would
be different if he lived, for example, in California, Arizona, or a New York
borough other than Manhattan, where neighborhoods are losing the fight to keep
up with the population increases open borders have created. Bloomberg owns 13
homes, among them three in exclusive Southampton, including his $20 million,
35-acre Ballyshear estate.

A more thoughtful,
more compassionate Bloomberg would know that in an economy that barely creates
enough jobs to keep pace with population growth and that may never again
achieve full employment, more uncontrolled immigration is the last thing
America needs. Future immigration, if any, should be carefully managed to
coincide with Americans’ needs and not the special interests that Bloomberg
symbolizes.

About the author

Joe Guzzardi is a Californians for Population Stabilization Senior Writing Fellow whose columns have been nationally syndicated since 1987.